"Alas! For
the sixth time the Christian dawn breaks again on
ever widening battlefields, on graveyards where
war victims lie buried in steadily lengthening
rows, on devastated lands where a few tottering
towers tell with silent pathos the story of once
flourishing and prosperous cities whose bells
have fallen to the ground, or have been carried
off, and no longer awaken the people with their
jubilant Christmas chimes."

1944 Christmas
letter from Pope Pius XII to the faithful
(footnote 1)

Dear Pope John Paul II:

Although the specific assignment
from our mutual friend Harry James Cargas was to join Holocaust
scholars in writing letters to the Vatican, perhaps both he and
you will forgive me if I, a child survivor of the Holocaust, take
the liberty of addressing this letter directly to you.

Indeed, among the lessons I draw
from the shoah is how inadequately organizations respond
to acute moral challenges, just as later they seem incapable of
accepting responsibility for their failures. In the United
States, where I live, the major American Jewish organizations
have yet to acknowledge to any significant degree the inadequacy
of their own response to the massacre of their brethren in
Europe.

Moreover, it is to you personally
that I now presume to write: the Pope who has acquired great
moral authority both inside and outside the Church; the Pole who
has made significant efforts to continue the healing work with
the Jews that was begun by Pope John XXIII.

Your Holiness, how exemplary it
would be to all if your legacy, as you lead us out of this
murderous 20th century, were to include a dramatic decision to
open all Vatican records from the Nazi era to the public.

Your Holiness, how inspiring it
would be to all if this announcement could be coupled with an
exhortation to your fellow Catholics to come to terms with the
inadequacy of the Vaticans response to the persecution and
massacre of the Jews during that challenging time.

I have been told that such
decisions on the Vaticans records are yours to make, that
the last Vatican records to have been made public are those
relating to the papacy of Benedict XV (1914-1922), and that when
Vatican records are made public the decision is made papacy by
papacy. The Vatican records to which I refer would thus be those
pertaining to the papacies of Pius XI (1922-1939) and Pius XII
(1939-1958).

The year 1998 marks the fortieth
anniversary of the death of Pope Pius XII. In the Bible that we
share, forty years is a generation. One generation later, might
it not be time to open the documents pertaining to the papacy of
Pius XII to the public?

I am aware that a few estimable
scholars have already been allowed free access to these
documents, and that many volumes of significant documents have
been published. But is not true that important facts often emerge
from ostensibly minor documents? That a different perspective can
greatly affect how a document is understood? And would it not be
helpful to still have eyewitnesses to those complex times when we
attempt to make sense of the documents pertaining to them?

It is possible that those Vatican
records may confirm just how very much the Vatican knew about the
massacre of the Jews, how very much the world knew. But can the
final healing ever approach until we all stop pretending that it
is more important to stress what we didnt know,
rather than to admit all that we did knowor were in
a position to learn?

If I may be so bold, perhaps such
a revitalizing admission of sin could even include the
recognition that the former Karol Wotyla bears a special
responsibility to his Church in this regard. Although
biographical accounts of your life as a young man living not far
from Auschwitz differ as to whether you did anything of
significance to help Jews, it does not appear that you yourself
believe that you were among those who rose to the righteousness
that those challenging times called for.

Some people after they act badly
towards someone never clearly and unmistakably acknowledge that
they acted badly but simply try to change their conduct in the
future¾ repent, as it were, by their deeds. But is it not much
more likely that they will avoid repeating their conduct,
consciously or unconsciously, if they succeed in identifying,
understanding, expressing what was wrong with that conduct
in the first place?

Christians share with Jews and
others a belief that words count. I ask that you raise your voice
even more loudly and more eloquently and more forcefully than you
have to date on the matter of the Christian share of
responsibility for the Holocaust. I ask that your words be
accompanied by a powerfully symbolic deed: the elimination of
current secrets and paralyzing taboos.

But while the opening of the
archives coupled with a renewed call for repentance would
constitute a powerful and needed message as Christians prepare to
embark on the third millennium since the birth of their faith,
there is yet another gift that I would like to request for the
faithful.

I am not as familiar with the
process of canonization as I should be, and as a Jew I personally
do not believe in saints. I have, however, met people who were
incapable then of passing by on the other side, no matter the
risks to them or their families.

There were many Catholics among
such people. There were many priests and nuns among such people.
There were, of course, priests who died in the camps with the
persecuted, having spurned even the special living conditions
that the Vatican sought and was able to obtain from the Third
Reich for many of its incarcerated followers.

You have already elevated more
people toward sainthood than all of your predecessors in this
century. I cannot believeI do not believethat among
those righteous Catholicsour "saints," the
chassidei umot haolam, the righteous among the
nationsthere werent also women and men whom you
would consider saints. I believe instead that an inadequate
effort has been made thus far to discover who these saints were.

Only if you identify the
righteous Catholics of the Holocaust will the Church be able to
learn from them and be changed by them, to the lasting benefit of
humankind.

Please allow me to mention why
the issue of the Christian response to the persecution and
massacre of the Jews is of passionate and personal interest to
me.

To begin with, I am a Jew born in
Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944, and that means that around the time
of my birth much of my family was humiliated, tortured and
murdered¾ while the world watched.

But I also may owe my very
existence, and that of my children, to righteous
Christiansto a community of righteous Christians. My mother
was a Polish Jew, from Bialystok. My father had been raised a
French Jew. When my mother became pregnant in the fall of 1943 in
Nazi-occupied France, they found food and shelter and peace and
friendship in a mountain community of some five thousand peasants
and villagers.

The sturdy people of the area of
Le Chambon, France, rooted in their history and their faith,
extended this dangerous hospitality to some five thousand Jews
who over the years made their way to this unique corner of the
world.

There, the people turned no one
away, betrayed no one, attempted to convert no one. There was
something to be done, and they just did it. No big deal. It was
who they were. Although this was essentially an old
Huguenot community, the Catholic minority there joined actively
in the rescue effort.

Thus I know what was possible.

However challenging some of what
I believe may be to Christians, those beliefs are those of a Jew
who will never forget that he survived the worst of what
Christians allowed to happen because of the best of which
Christians wereand arecapable.

Surely, values cannot be taught
if the teacher considers that he is not accountable as well.
Surely, moral distinctions are most effectively made about others
when there is willingness to face one's own responsibilities.

Im aware that not only
individual Catholics but the Vatican itself did do a number of
good things in favor of the Jews. In fact, I suspect that the
Vatican did more than we know, more than has been trumpeted.
Perhaps discomfort about what was not done has prevented
us from knowing more about what was done. The Vatican
archives, I am sure, contain much that is good.

We need to know both: the good
and the bad. In fact, can we fully understand the bad if we
dont appreciate the good? Can we fully appreciate the good
if we dont understand more about the bad?

I live near Hollywood and am a
filmmaker. I well know that I have no right to any airs of moral
superiority.

I was astonished and moved when
my labor of love, a feature documentary about the people of Le
Chambon, Weapons of the Spirit, was purchased for broadcast on Polish
television even before it was acquired by French television. I
had the opportunity to ask Jan Karski, that legendary, righteous
Polish emissary to the West, what should be my attitude now
towards Poland. As always, he spoke slowly and chose his words
carefully: "Show them sympathy. And forgiveness."

I am, in fact, eager to make
Polish friends, eager to reconnect with the land where my
ancestors lived for centuriesby no means always unhappily.

As a Jew, I also believe that
there is more that binds me to committed Christians than to
aggressive secularists, although I was raised by just such
militant secularists. (Religiously, I was raised as a
"nothing." It is only when I turned 18 that my parents
revealed that they and I were Jewish. I know something about
taboos and the need to overcome them.)

Im sure that soon we will
all be beyond debating the appalling inarticulateness and
misguided political savvy of Pope Pius XII. Elie Wiesel has said
that the Pope "should have gone to Auschwitz then. He should
have tried to save Jews then and risked his life." (Footnote
2.) Do such words reflect merely a Jewish vision of prophetic
leadership? Would not Jesus himself have stood with the
persecuted, even if they hadnt been his people and even if
hed had other, conflicting responsibilities to his
followers? Have you not yourself been arguing that religious
convictions should be brought to bear on political issues? If not
then, when?

Why were the advocates and
practitioners of murder not themselves denied the sacraments? Why
were they not told that if the "rumors" were
true, mortal sins were being committed? Is there any record of
Hitler, that son of Catholics and former choirboy, even being threatened
with excommunication?

Soon, it will no longer be so
much a matter of what happenedor did not happenthen.
It will be a matter how we react to what happened then.

Thus, for instance, the
Popes Christmas message of 1944, excerpted above, may not
yet speak for itself. Christians might still read it today
without even imagining the nature and depth of one possible
reaction to it, to the pain that it still has the power to
inflict.

Of course, by Christmas of 1944
the (inadvertent) liberation of the death camps had begun:
Majdanek, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibór... There can be no doubt
whatever that by then the Holy Father well knew that the children
of Christians had long been torturing and murdering innocent men,
women and children, participating in an attempt to eliminate the
Jews and their heritage from the earth.

But Pope Pius and his writers
speak only of "battlefields" and neatly buried
"war victims." With the stench of Auschwitz in his
nostrils, your predecessor waxes poetic about the
"pathos" of fallen cities and of demolished church
bells that can no longer awaken the faithful with their
"jubilant Christmas chimes."

At the end 1944, with nothing to
fear any more from the Third Reich, knowing full well than in the
heart of Christendom millions had been tortured and murdered
because they had been born Jewish, Pope Pius XII does not even acknowledge
these non-battlefield dead, these murdered who were not buried
but incinerated, these victims not of war but of antisemitism and
racism.

And while his reaction may be of
a different nature, should not a Christian also be saddened by
the ineffectiveness of his faith at that moment? Is it not indeed
true that "everything that rises converges"? (Footnote
3.) Do we not all aspire to a common understanding of our
heritage?

Christians and non-Christians,
believers and non-believers, we all live in the shadow of a great
lesson: the truth will make you free.

You have made your mark on this
century in many important ways. May your time on earth also be
remembered for your bold decision to reveal and proclaim the full
record of Vatican activity during a disastrous time in human
history, while also identifying and sharing with future
generations those exemplary Catholics whose divine inspiration
led them to effortless communion with their fellow man and woman.